Geneva
(ENI) -- A Palestinian church leader has accused Israel of practising "ethnic
cleansing" against Palestinians and has called for solidarity from Christians
and churches around the world.

Archimandrite
Theodosios Hanna, of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, told
a public briefing on October 19 at the Geneva headquarters of the World
Council of Churches (WCC) that Palestinian Christians "are suffering, because
they are Palestinians and they want to stay in their homeland..."

Fr. Theodosios
was representing Patriarch Diodoros, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem,
as part of a Palestinian ecumenical delegation invited by the WCC to Geneva
where the United Nations Commission on Human Rights was meeting to consider
the Middle East crisis.

The delegation
also included Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal, of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem
and the Middle East, and Dr. Marwan Bishara, a Nazareth journalist who
is a research fellow at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
in Paris. (The delegation was accompanied by Georges Tsetsis, a member
of the WCC's central and executive committees, and former representative
of the Ecumenical Patriarchate at the WCC's headquarters.) Three other
Palestinian Christians who were invited were unable to come to Geneva because
of the Israeli military's closure of Palestinian territories.

Speaking through
an interpreter, Archimandrite Theodosios said: "Israel is practising ethnic
cleansing against the Arabs -- Muslim and Christian. Everyone thinks that
there is a conflict between Arabs and Israelis. It is not a conflict between
Arabs and Israelis, but an occupation by Israel."

Calling on
churches worldwide to hold special prayers for the Palestinian people,
he continued: "We are asking all the churches in the World Council of Churches
to make visible the pain and suffering of the Palestinian people and to
support the Palestinian people in the struggle for a just peace that guarantees
all their rights... Palestinian people should be enjoying... independence
in their own state, the capital of which is Jerusalem."

In a written
statement to the human rights commission, the WCC's Commission of the Churches
on International Affairs said that events following the "provocative visit
[of the Israeli opposition leader, Ariel Sharon] to Al-Haram Al-Sharif
have again shown that the consequence of this repeated defiance [by Israel]
of international law, of continuing systematic violations of human rights
... has been to incite to violence and to deny peace and security to both
peoples."

Interviewed
yesterday by ENI, Dr. Bishara warned that the peace process initiated by
the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization
had run its course. "Forget Oslo. Oslo is dead," he told ENI. "The peace
process in the last seven years hasn't delivered the goods for the Palestinians...
a better standard of living, access to education, access to health, access
to the job market. None of that has improved in the last seven years. In
fact, according to World Bank figures and data, unemployment has risen,
GDP [Gross Domestic Product] has fallen."

The recent
"excessive use of lethal force" -- Israel's response to the riots -- had
turned the expression of Palestinian frustration "into a much wider confrontation,
engulfing not only Palestinians in the occupied territories, but also Palestinians
inside Israel."

The idea of
a peace process as a slow, cumulative idea "no longer works," Dr. Bishara
told ENI. "It is now essential for the parties to move towards physical,
geographic, but, most importantly, legal separation between two sovereign,
independent states. This is the only way we can stop the violence."

The declaration
of Palestinian statehood, he said, would be "a first step for the strengthening
of Palestinian society and to allow Palestine to negotiate with Israel
on a list of issues, without being on the other side of an Israeli [gun]
barrel."

Dr. Bishara,
himself a Roman Catholic, stressed that the conflict is not a religious
one between Jews and Muslims, "but a racist and colonial conflict touching
Christian communities as well as Muslim communities."

Describing
comments from members of the ecumenical delegation, he said: "They made
it clear that Israeli bullets did not, do not and will not distinguish
between Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims ... Crimes against
Palestinians are also crimes against Christians."

EDITORIAL
NOTE from Canadian Islamic Council: The historic plight of minority Palestinian
Christians caught in the ongoing Middle East crisis is one of the most
painful and least-understood by the rest of the world. A highly recommended
personal and political account by one prominent religious leader is: I
Am A Palestinian Christian, by Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, Pastor of the Evangelical
Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, the West Bank (Fortress Press,
Minneapolis, 1995, 164 pages). Since before the mid-1980s Intifada, his
church has initiated social outreach programs and dialogue among Christians,
Muslims and Jews.